Stevens, Mitchell
Academic Title
Other Titles
Associate Professor of Sociology, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business (by courtesy)
Director, Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research (SCANCOR)
Contact Info
Admin. Support
Program Affiliations
Research
Stevens is an organizational sociologist with longstanding interests in the quantification of educational processes, alternative educational forms, and the formal organization of knowledge.
With funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Stevens is directing a project with Stanford colleague Michael Kirst to develop a more comprehensive "supply-side" social science of U.S. colleges and universities. He also is at work on a large-scale study of how U.S. universities organize research and instruction about the rest of the world.
Quote
"Despite wide consensus among higher education leaders that U.S. universities are undergoing a process of 'globalization,' there is little agreement about just what globalization means, what propels it, or what intellectual, political, and ethical consequences it will bring for American higher education. There is little systematic empirical research on the range of things often described by the term globalization: the proliferation of satellite campuses and cooperative agreements between schools; the growing scale and complexity of student flows across national borders; the diffusion of institutional and curricular norms; and the 'internationalization' of instructional programs, to name just a few. Whatever its content, there is no clear social science research agenda or intellectual framework for assessing the globalization of U.S. higher education."
- from "Academic Internationalism: U.S. Universities in Transition," 2009
Education
- PhD, Northwestern University, 1996
- BA, Macalester College, 1988
Time at Stanford
2009
Professional Experience
2003-2009: Associate Professor, New York University
1995-2003: Assistant to Associate Professor, Hamilton College
Courses Taught
- EDUC 418 Case Study Research
- EDUC 355 Higher Education and Society
- EDUC 250a Measurement and Inquiry in Education
- EDUC 199 Undergraduate Honors Seminar
Recent Publications
"A Sociology of Quantification" (w/ Wendy Nelson Espeland), European Journal of Sociology XLIX (2008):401-436.
"Sieve, Incubator, Temple, Hub: Empirical and Theoretical Advances in the Sociology of Higher Education" (w/ Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Richard Arum), Annual Review of Sociology 34 (2008):127-151.
"Culture and Education," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 619 (2008):97-113.
Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites, Harvard University Press, 2007.
Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Home Schooling Movement, Princeton University Press, 2001.
Current Activities
"Ambivalent Internationals: How the U.S. Social Sciences Organize Inquiry about the Rest of the World" (w/ Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Seteney Shami)
"Sports and Status in U.S. Higher Education" (w/ Arie Lifschitz and Michael Sauder)
"Toward a New Historical Sociology of U.S. Higher Education"
